Peter Messent is no stranger to Mark Twain studies. This volume
is his fourth contribution, in addition to New Readings of the American
Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application, which included a chapter
demonstrating how Bakhtin's narrative theory elucidates aspects of Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn. He also co-edited the Twain-related volume The
Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell. As with all of his earlier
books on Twain, The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain is highly
readable and insightful, and the strengths of his earlier books show up here
in the succinct and engaging biographical outline and especially in the commentary
on the major works. And although it is part of a series that is designed primarily
for undergraduate students and readers not very familiar with its subject,
readers with more exposure to the life and works of America's most famous
writer may well find it worthwhile.

As useful an introduction as it is to Mark Twain, I cannot avoid wondering
about some of the decisions that went into the organization of the book. Divided
into four chapters--"Mark Twain's life," "Contexts," "Works,"
and "Critical reception and the late works"--the volume focuses
on an appropriate set of issues, but some are arranged in a curiously unbalanced
structure.

Messent devotes nearly three quarters of the book (87 of 119
pages) to the third chapter--a wise decision, because it is the center of
his focus. This chapter is sub-divided into four sections dealing with different
influences or examples: vernacular humor; travel writing, including Innocents
Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi;
two relatively early works of fiction, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn; and two later works of fiction, A Connecticut Yankee and
Pudd'nhead Wilson.

In the first section, Messent provides an articulate overview
of the quirky techniques of Twain's humor, tracing it from his far West journalism,
with an extended explanation of the "Jumping Frog" story and frontier
oddities like the "Personal Habits of Siamese Twins," through his
naive posture in Innocents Abroad, the development of a vernacular
narrator like Huck, the temporal dislocation of Connecticut Yankee,
and finally with late work like the satire of Sherlock Holmes in "A Double-Barreled
Detective Story" and the philosophical distance of Letters from Earth.

The section on travel writing explains at a higher degree of detail how Mark
Twain plays the role of tourist in Innocents Abroad, a precursor to
what would later be popularly referred to as the Ugly American. Perhaps more
notably, that book altered the format in which his writing appeared. To become
a "scribbler of books," as he would denote this stage of his career
in Life on the Mississippi, is a remarkable elevation of one who began
as a writer of humorous squibs. Messent pays considerable attention to A
Tramp Abroad, a work most often mentioned by other scholars in passing
as a book taken up in the midst of the difficult composition of Huckleberry
Finn. Messent persuasively argues that A Tramp Abroad maximizes
the best impulses of Twain's first travel book and benefits from a more self-conscious
and seasoned awareness of what it means to be a tourist: "Twain engages
issues that have since become central to the travel narrative. He shows how
tourism affects, and promotes a false version of the countries it colonises.
He is aware, too, of the mutual part both guest and host play as this occurs"
(49). Turning to the American travel books, Messent notes the quality of bildungsroman
that shapes Roughing It as well as a willingness to digress and to
focus on tales about story telling. This latter tendency continues and is
exaggerated in Life on the Mississippi while also showing Twain's interest
in retrospection, which Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would
capitalize on, and the ways of the South, which would help to focus his interest
on the issue of racial and class-based inequality in subsequent work.

The section of the chapter dealing with those two novels is
equal in length to that which covered all four of the travel narratives, and
appropriately so. Messent handles the narrative intricacies, problems, and
themes with accessible sophistication. His analysis focuses on archetypal
qualities in Tom Sawyer as a mythology of American boyhood and the
process of emerging into adult society. In his treatment of Huckleberry
Finn, Messent points to its complex status as a realist text and its grappling
with the issue of race that has been so central to American culture.

The section on A Connecticut Yankee and Pudd'nhead
Wilson similarly emphasize the degrees of complexity that Twain takes
on in each narrative's attempt to frame an American identity. Twain's time-travel
fantasy begins as a celebration of American virtue in response to Matthew
Arnold's criticism of America but ends with a dystopian apocalypse as conflicted
about the present as it is about the past. Pudd'nhead Wilson, on the
other hand, returns to the region and era of the earlier novels, but complicates
and ironizes the racial issues even more than in Huckleberry Finn.
All of this makes for a very packed chapter, one that might have profitably
been divided into two or three.

Given the clarity and depth of Messent's accounts of the texts
and his subtle interpretive framing of them, other chapters disappoint because
they do not rise to the level of this central, well-executed chapter. The
second and fourth chapters in particular are either so scant or misdirected
that they raise questions about their purposes. "Contexts," the
second chapter, concerns me for what its title suggests but its contents insufficiently
deliver. Only ten pages in total, this chapter begins with some general comments
about events that occurred during Twain's lifetime, but then segues into some
of the various critical responses to his work, leading with Toni Morrison's
assessment of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These critical responses
seem more appropriate to the fourth chapter, and some of it is repeated there,
leading one to wonder why it was inserted in the "Contexts" chapter.
The balance of "Contexts" deals with the division between the actual
man and his authorial persona, which I would argue belongs in the first chapter,
"Mark Twain's life." Moreover, a chapter titled "Contexts"
might have more fruitfully expanded upon cultural developments that frame,
influence, and are addressed in the writings, beyond the few slight gestures
in this direction with general references to the Civil War or late-nineteenth-century
technological progress. Surveying the chapter retrospectively, one comes away
with the sense that material that is better suited to other chapters ended
up here to fill out the section into a still rather-too-short chapter. A more
purposeful execution would have expanded on what the title promises and reallocated
material that belongs elsewhere. Messent does occasionally refer to historical
contexts later, during his account of some of the works in chapter 3, and
these instances generally work more effectively because they serve to illuminate
an aspect of the writing. In chapter 2, however, they form a loose catalog
that lacks a clear relevance.

The final chapter, "Critical reception and the late works"--also
only ten pages in length, so it hardly does justice to its title--is another
area of concern. To be sure, an undergraduate introduction need not address
the entire history of critical reception, but a slightly more detailed account
of how the responses to Twain's writing have evolved, how contemporary criticism
has paralleled the emergence of other social developments, and how it treats
the texts differently than earlier commentary did would be useful. Limiting
his commentary to a relative handful of critics, Messent also privileges Twain's
transnationalism, which has arisen as a critical angle in recent years. Messent
writes: "By transnationalism, we mean the cultural intersections and
exchanges that take place between nations, and the way we can then read American
Literature, and (in this case) Twain's writing in particular, as composed
of a series of negotiations between national and international spaces"
(115-16). Messent also foregrounds transnationalism in the section on travel
writing in chapter 3 and in his discussion of A Connecticut Yankee.
As a professor at the University of Nottingham, Messent has a British perspective
that affords him authority in measuring that aspect of Twain's work. However,
the weight that Messent applies to this critical perspective is arguably too
heavy and reflects a bias about contemporary globalism that skews the introduction
as well as risking its consideration of the nineteenth century in presentism.

The last chapter "Guide to further reading," is useful though far
from exhaustive. Messent lists secondary sources of biography, bibliography,
criticism, and internet sites in thirteen categories. There are any number
of titles that could well have been included here, but there is nothing listed
that should not be. The "Notes" are also useful references to sources
that Messent has relied on in his commentary. However, in a couple of instances,
they raise questions about sourcing. For example, in at least two cases Messent
cites one of his own earlier works to source a quote that he has drawn from
another text, Howells in one and Bakhtin in another. Given that he includes
full citations for the original sources in his previous work, it's not at
all clear why the second-hand references appear in the Cambridge Introduction
to Mark Twain. This is not a large matter, but it does exemplify for undergraduates
a practice that is generally discouraged when, in teaching the responsibilities
of scholarship, we stress the importance of tracking a quotation to its source
to insure its reliability and to understand its context.

Despite these reservations about organization and proportion, the core of
Messent's book is an effective introduction of its subject, especially valuable
for its target audience; indeed, I've recommended it to my own students. Books
in a series are often formulated to a template that is not one of the author's
own devising, and I suspect that some of my concerns derive from that requirement
of publication. My reservations stem, however, from my regard for the standard
that Messent has set in his earlier work. He rises to that standard throughout
most of this volume; the lapses, though, are the more glaring because of the
quality when the book is on the mark.